It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.

Today is 1984 Day

Democracy cannot survive in a country where the right of people to live in privacy is not respected. When people reasonably suspect that their own government is seizing personal information that reveals their political activities and ideological affiliations, they will come to fear involvement in the political process. If people know that their communications are being monitored by government spies, they will worry that activism for unpopular causes or for organizations that oppose government policies may be punished. In such situations, people will begin to self-censor, to withdraw from the processes of citizenship that keep democracy alive. Even when elections continue, full citizen participation in elections will not. Democracy in form will persist, but as an empty shell.

This is the danger that we are faced with in the United States of America today. We have learned this summer that military spies at the National Security Agency are collecting both content and metadata of Americans’ telephone calls, emails and Internet activity. At the same time, the FBI is spying on us with drone aircraft overhead, and law enforcement networks are tracking where we drive using cameras that record our license plate numbers.

We are one nation, under surveillance.

Today, in 20 cities across the country, people are protesting the ominous growth of an American surveillance state. The demonstrators are calling it 1984 Day – after the novel by George Orwell in which Big Brother maintains autocratic power through they creation of a system of ubiquitous surveillance.

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